BlazeVOX books

Nomads with Samsonite by Timothy Bradford

Timothy Bradford gnaws on the big questions: should I run with my pack, or should I go it alone? Where to find enlightenment? What is a dead animal? What is the spirit’s realm? The mind falls into its quandaries, and the body, drunk with it, tags along. These poems, roving across continents, restlessly seek to locate consciousness in the world, a universe which “opens like a tulip / or closes like a fist,” where the poet is not afraid to admit: “I forget / which.”

—Eleni Sikelianos, author of Body Clock and The Book of Jon

I have not been so moved by a collection of poems in a long, long time. I thought I was turning into the character Anders from that Tobias Wolff story "Bullet in the Brain,” but Nomads With Samsonite saved me. It's heartbreaking slash heartwarming, smart, and enthralling. I found the book "settling on me like an x-ray apron" and transporting me back to a time of poetic innocence I had seemingly lost the instinct to yearn for.

—Jerry Williams, author of Admission and Casino of the Sun

Deeply ruminative, with the collision of both an expansive & a recitative logic system, Nomads with Samsonite populates the world with exactly what it is already full of. But in this naming & numbering, in these poems of questioning & wondering, Timothy Bradford has presented his readers with a new language for living carefully, with love & attention.

—Nate Pritts, author of Big Bright Sun & editor of H_NGM_N

Timothy Bradford is the author of the introduction to Sadhus (Cuerpos Pintados, 2003), a photography book on the ascetics of South Asia. In 2005, he received the Koret Foundation’s Young Writer on Jewish Themes Award for his novel-in-progress based on the history of the Vélodrome d’Hiver, and from 2007 to 2009, he was a guest researcher at the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent in Paris. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals including 42opus, Bombay Gin, CrossConnect, DIAGRAM, Drunken Boat, ecopoetics, H_NGM_N, Mudlark, No Tell Motel, Poems & Plays, and Upstairs at Duroc. He currently teaches English at the University of Central Oklahoma and lives with his wife, two sons, and an ever-changing menagerie just outside of Oklahoma City.